Katzenjammer
by Koi Lungfish
Summary: G1, preEarth - Starscream wakes up with a hangover and a horrible surprise.


**Title: Katzenjammer  
Author: Koi Lungfish  
Disclaimer: Based on characters and situations from The Transformers ((c) 1986 Hasbro, Ltd). Used without permission. Text (c) 2007, Koi Lung Fish (Mark of Lung. All Rights Reserved).  
Continuity: G1 cartoon, pre-Earth.**

**WARNING! SLASH**

* * *

Starscream woke from the torpor of over-energisation feeling not a micron like the smooth, sleek, high-performance war machine he had been the night before. The dead weight of his body was piled on him to such a leaden extent, his joints so stiff and loud, his thoughts so slow and so fractured, he wondered if he hadn't accidentally traded bodies with Megatron in the night. 

Above all, penetrating through the merciful fog of self-imposed blindness, came an abominable wailing as of a felinoid in desperate pain.

_Nyaeeee!_ it went, a long and pleading whine that entered his audios with a similar sensation to being stabbed in the side of the head with a high-speed drill. The sound was so agonisingly similar that Starscream began to wonder in a crippled way if someone wasn't actually trying to drill through his head.

_Nyaeeee!_ it continued. Fingers clumsy as dancing tanks, he groped up the side of his head and felt the vents on the sides of his helm. They were still intact, no holes, no hot spots, no damage that his newly brutish fingertips could discern.

Starscream gently let his head flop forwards and rested his forehead against the cold surface of the recharge plinth, the gentle hum of its power circuits flowing through him in pale, soothing waves. The inside of his head felt full of green sparks and crackling sensations, his radio module was scrambled and his wings ached as if someone had been walking up and down on them.

_Nyaeeee!_ the sound went on, repeating over and over every five or six seconds.

_I am going to die,_ Starscream thought, folding an arm over the back of his intakes and head. It did nothing to block the sound out - indeed, he could feel the horrible whine vibrating through his frame. _It hurts!_

_Nyaeeee! Nyaeeee! Nyaeeee!_

_I'm going to have to kill someone,_ Starscream concluded. _I haven't even switched my optics on yet and I'm going to have to kill someone. Anyone._

_Nyaeeee!_

_By the peaks of Vos, did I throw Ravage in a disassembly module, or has someone planted a shrieker alarm in here?_ Starscream wondered, as the sound scorched the pathways of his audio circuitry. He folded both arms over his head. "Stop that infernal - _nyaeeee!_"

Starscream's forehead hit the plinth with a _tunk_ and a loud groan that was burst by a sudden, unwanted, hiccup-like _nyaeeee!_

_That's_ me I _am making that horrible sound? Augh!_ Starscream thunked his head against the plinth again, stabbing shocks of cold pain through his brain module. _I must have had a major short circuit in my voice box. _He switched off his vocaliser, and had cool silence for a good ten seconds before there came a tickle in his vocal processor, a buzzy feeling of a sub-processor realising it wasn't getting a response to its signal. With a sick feeling in the back of his throat added to the sick feelings all over his aching body, Starscream felt his vocal processor reactivate his voice box - _Nyaeeee! Nyaeeee!_

Starscream thumped the recharge plinth, hated himself when the shock jarred his misaligned joints, ran up his arm and gave his sore wings a sharp shake. _Sub-processor corruption! I'll have to take my entire vocal network offline to stop this racket, and then I'll be mute until I can fix it!_

"How did I get this - _nyaeeee!_ - badly over-energised?" he moaned, the jolt of the misfiring sub-processor making him twitch. The tensor cables in his legs groaned as he stretched, pulling them out of seized configurations. "I want a - _nyaeeee!_ - bath, and a toolkit, and a - _nyaeeee! - shut up blast it!_"

He had a fraction of a second in which to consider shooting himself in the throat with his own null-rays when someone next to him groaned.

_Oh no,_ Starscream thought, flicking his optics on at low power to peer through grainy brightness at the shape he was draped haphazardly over. "Who the blasted _nyaeeee!_ are you?"

The stranger - Starscream could make out a Decepticon mark, which was a good start, but no familiar features beyond that - moaned and put his hands over his face. "Ow, my _head_," it went.

Starscream jammed the barrel of his left arm-gun into the stranger's face. The fingers parted slightly, an optic staring up his gun-barrel with the quiescence of someone too hungover to be afraid. "I can fix that perma_nyaeeee!_ - oh, for Cybertron's sake!"

"Do I know you?" asked the supine Decepticon, squinting at him between his fingers and around the null ray.

"I'm _Starscream! Nyaeeee!_ And I'm going to kill everyone within _nyaeeee_-earshot if that blasted _nyaeeee!_ doesn't stop soon!" He pushed himself up, ignoring the whine and crack of his servos as they woke from dry hibernation, and sat back on his heels. His head cleared enough for him to access the base computer - _where the hell am I? This isn't Vos!_ - before a rambling error fritzed through his interface terminal. He snarled, was interrupted by his own malfunction-whine, and asked the stranger, "Who are you?"

"Tidearrow," he said, looked up at him with pale pink optics. He was tall and heavy-built, with long curved wings, his body dark blue with inlaid translucent green panels...

Starscream groaned, whined, then groaned again. "What was I calling you last - _nyaeeee!_ - night?"

"Megatron," said Tidearrow. "Most of the time. You called me Dreadmoon a lot, and I think at one point you were yelling for someone called -"

"_Shut up!_" Starscream shouted, then spasmed as pain shot in through his audios, crisscrossed his processors and bolted down his backstrut.

"No, that wasn't the name," Tidearrow said, and Starscream thought he heard a hint of a laugh at the back of his voice.

"You intolerable fool!" Starscream leant to his left, pushing the wavering gun into Tidearrow's face since his vision was too filled with static and wheeling data-pointers for him to target on automatic. "_Nyaeeee!_ This is becoming - _nyaeeee!_ - unbearable!"

Tidearrow slowly raised his hands in surrender, leaving Starscream's null ray unsupported and wavering against his face. The Air Commander swayed, then leant back to steady himself. His gun barrel wove in the air a forearm's length from Tidearrow's face. "I didn't do it."

Starscream grimaced. The thought of this idiot's hands on him, fingers probing his wing-joints, made his already queasy fuel tanks churn. _At least I can't eject fuel with an empty tank,_ he thought. "Ugh. How did I pick _you_ up?"

"By the throat," Tidearrow said, spreading his hands in surrender. "Then you dragged me over the bar, hit me in the face two or three times, and told me if we weren't somewhere private in three breems you'd kill me."

Starscream stared. "_I_ did - _nyaeee!_ - that?"

Tidearrow nodded, smiling slightly. "Enthusiastically." He stopped staring at the gun and looked Starscream in the face. "You're not going to shoot me in that condition are you? I mean, you don't look like you could hit the sky -"

Starscream fired. The bolt hit the plinth near Tidearrow's head, splashing his face with hot metal and shorting out the power circuits for the recharge plinth. It died with a sad crackle and whimper.

Tidearrow chuckled nervously, and cringed. "Eheheh ... you going to hold last night against me, aren't you?"

"I'm going to - _nyaeeee!_ - strip your bearings for - _nyaeeee!_ - spare - _nyaeeee! Blast, burn and smelt it!_" He jabbed his right hand at his throat, feeling for his vocal net in order to crush the power lines.

"Are you threatening me or getting off?" Tidearrow asked, fright turning to bewilderment.

Starscream stopped steel-still in shock, hand still at his throat. He tipped his head down so sharply he almost trapped his fingers between his chin and chest, and stared at Tidearrow. "You - _nyaeeee!_ You - you - _nyaeeee! Augh!_"

Tidearrow chuckled quietly.

Starscream stopped still, staring at his one-night stand with amazement and hatred. "You dare belittle - _nyaeeee!_ - me? Me? Starscream? Air Commander of the - _nyaeeee!_ - Decepticon Battle Fleet?"

"Erheh," Tidearrow went, cringing with an added inflection of nervous smile. "No?"

"You _laughed_ at - _nyaeeee!_ - me!" Starscream shouted. Both of them flinched at his volume.

"Well, you have to admit, you sound pretty -"

Starscream jabbed his gun in Tidearrow's face. "Say 'funny' and you die." Tidearrow looked up the barrel of Starscream's null-ray. Starscream could see his lips moving - the wretch was trying not to laugh. He charged the null generator of his gun, the familiar whine lost under the humiliating hiccupping shriek that burst out of his vocaliser. _If you so much as _smirk _at me, you die!_ "Well? Do you have anything to - _nyaeeee!_ - say that might salvage your worthless life?"

Tidearrow dragged his gaze from the gun in his face and looked Starscream in the face. His mouth pulled into an uncontrollable smile, his optics full of the realisation his minutes were numbered.

Starscream's optics narrowed. "Make your last words worth saying."

The smile reached Tidearrow's optics, filling them with a frantic glitter of laughter. "You know, for all that everyone says about you and Megatron, you give _lousy_ -"

Starscream shot him.

Tidearrow's head exploded in a molten, graphic display of how Starscream's hangover felt. His body jerked, flopped, leaked a bit from the neck, then began the slow fade to grey.

Starscream groaned, squeal-hiccupped and rubbed the static from his face with a stiff hand. _I want a bath. I want a bath, and a toolkit, and a cluster of medicroids to fix my wings._ He eased himself back down onto the non-functional recharge plinth, now room temperature and comfortless, and curled up in a heap of aching angles. Finally, he deactivated his vocal network. _I want my radio debugged, and I want this headache to stop, and this wingache to stop, and -_

"_Nyaeeee!_"

_- I want to die._

* * *

**Author's notes & addenda:  
Feedback always welcomed.**


End file.
